There was one key takeaway from the recent PlayStation 5 games reveal, beyond how good the key titles looked – and that’s the fact that the 30fps console video game is clearly a thing of the past. In actual fact, the evidence suggests that the 30fps performance target underpins the majority of Sony’s impressive first-party offerings including Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It’s seemingly a key point of difference between PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X – while stressing that developers can use the console’s power as they wish, Microsoft has often talked about 60fps as a design target for next-gen, even mooting the idea of 120fps gaming in some scenarios for the new wave of HDMI 2.1 displays.
The arrival of a new console generation always brings with it expectations of 60fps gaming but it’s my contention that any move away from the console standard 30 frames per second has to come from the developer, because while the next-gen consoles from both Sony and Microsoft are highly powerful – the extra horsepower can only go so far. In creating Xbox Series X, the Microsoft hardware team aimed for a minimum of 2x the compute power of Xbox One X. They got that (and more) but the basic maths is pretty straightforward – if you deliver twice the power of existing console hardware, doubling frame-rate effectively sucks up most of that extra throughput, meaning that there’s little left over to push graphical fidelity in other areas.
Sony kicked off its PS5 reveal with a short teaser for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales – and the evidence suggests that developer Insomniac is sticking with the 30fps performance of the original game, even though the horsepower exists to double frame-rate to 60fps. Ever since the reveal, I’ve been thinking a lot about what one of my favourite games of this console generation would look like running at 60fps, so when my PC was otherwise idle, I set it up to process two hours of Spider-Man PS4 Pro 4K capture, using pixel-motion analysis to deliver a frame-rate upscale from 30fps to 60fps. The results of my efforts can be seen below, but suffice to say, the cumulative 48 hours of render time probably won’t be doing my electricity bill any favours – and my power supply swiftly started to give up the ghost afterwards.
Seeing the game play out at 60fps is an absolute treat, and perhaps gives us some idea of the path taken by the developer. After replaying the game and revisiting the Miles Morales PS5 trailer, it’s pretty clear that Insomniac decided to take its Spider-Man engine in a very different direction as opposed to simply doubling up on frame-rate. It’s difficult to draw too many conclusions from what is a very short snippet of action but over and above the effects work on display – the likes of which you don’t see in Spider-Man PS4 – there is the sense that the studio is taking existing technologies and amping them up, while at the same time adding new features. It’s an approach that likely wouldn’t be possible if the studio were looking to double frame-rate at the same time – certainly not without a ground-up revamp of the technology.